Paragon got world first heroic Ragnaros which is by no means a small feat! Over 500 tries later, the Firelord was downed. Other than that, we have a huge news round up and some hotfixes which were just posted.

July 19

General

The frequency at which players can use /yell, /say, and any emotes is now throttled to prevent excessive spamming of chat logs from occurring.

Classes

Death Knights

Improved Death Strike now provides 40/80/120% bonus damage, up from 30/60/90%, and a 10/20/30% critical strike bonus, up from 3/6/9%.

Druids

Flight Form now cancels the Leyara’s Locket buff.

Moonfire will now generate Lunar Energy when crossing from Solar to Lunar on the Eclipse bar.

Dungeons & Raids

All bosses in The Bastion of Twilight, Blackwing Descent, and Throne of the Four Winds once again award Valor Points in all raid sizes and difficulties. 10-player bosses award 35 Valor Points, while 25-player bosses award 45 Valor Points. This change does not apply to Argaloth in Baradin Hold. More information can be found here.

Firelands

Superheated cannot be cast on players, even if they attack the Flamewaker Animators as they are channeling energy towards the Unstable Magma.

Alysrazor

Collecting Blazing Power now refreshes Wings of Flame to its full duration each time.

Alysrazor will now always face the correct direction during Firestorm.

Imprinted should now be cleared from characters under all conditions when the encounter resets.

Interacting with a Molten Feather will now dismount characters, preventing the feather from being wasted.

Beth’tilac

Beth'tilac will now only eat spiderlings that move very close to her (the range on her ability to consume them has been reduced). In addition, eaten spiderlings will no longer sometimes remain on the ground or on players once she consumes them.

It should always be possible to interact with Cloudbursts, even if several players click on one at the same time.

Items

Heroic bind-on-equip items now sell to vendors for gold.

PvP

Arenas

A resolution has been put into place which should help alleviate Rated Battleground matchmaking delays. This fix corrects an issue that could occur if a team at the front of the queue was particularly difficult to match, resulting in a bottleneck which slowed matchmaking for all players in queue. More information can be found here.

Quests & Creatures

The melee evasion angle of several creatures has been adjusted. Most notably, melee classes should no longer be seeing abilities, such as Backstab or Shred, getting parried when standing well enough out of Ragnaros’s melee evasion angle, or other bosses/creatures with similar evasion angles.

Honor Compensation Issue

Some players did not properly receive the Honor they were promised in compensation for spending Honor on any item level 365 items following the release of 4.2 (see our previous blog detailing their plan), between the June 28 and July 5 maintenances. Don't worry, Blizzard has planned a short maintenance tomorrow morning to correct this.

Around 50% of the intended recipients did not receive the 4000 honor that they should have with today’s maintenance. We’re in the process of scheduling an off-peak maintenance early tomorrow morning to correct that and deliver the remaining compensation packages.

Sorry for the hiccup, we’ll get them to you soon.

Purchasing Lvl 85 PVP Gear Pre-85 (and why you can't)

Players are arguing that they should be able to purchase level 85 PVP gear with Honor earned prior to reaching level 85. They bring up some good points (such as that you can earn Justice Points prior to 85) - what do you guys think?

Seriously, why am I unable to buy honor gear prior to hitting 85 with my alts. They earned that honor just like everyone else and it was much harder earned since low level honor rewards are so much lower. Its unreasonable for me to be unable to spend it on end game honor rewards that I can then equip when I hit 85.

I would love one solid reason for why I'm not allowed to do this other than "but then what would you do when you hit 85?"

My definition of a solid reason is one that makes sense. Is there any player that considers this to be a valid idea?

What Aarschott explained to you does make sense. Level-85 PvP gear is intended to be earned and awarded to level-85 players. There is too much potential to "game" the system and stockpile really powerful gear so that you're fully equipped when you hit 85, if we were to allow you to buy level-85 gear with Honor you earned below the level cap.

The same applies for PvE gear. If you want powerful endgame items, you need to earn them via playing through endgame content.

What Aarschott explained to you does make sense. Level-85 PvP gear is intended to be earned and awarded to level-85 players. There is too much potential to "game" the system and stockpile really powerful gear so that you're fully equipped when you hit 85, if we were to allow you to buy level-85 gear with Honor you earned below the level cap.

That sounds suspiciously like "Working as intended." I think what he's asking is why it's intended to work that way?

Why don't you want a player having honor gear the second he/she hits 85?

It's not necessarily good entertainment to go and get your butt kicked repeatedly in BGs for 150 sessions before you can begin to compete.There are crafted items available to level-85 players which will help them substantially when first setting foot into Battlegrounds or Tol Barad. Getting a hold of this gear isn't too difficult.

The fact is that endgame progression is its own experience. Leveling is a very direct and obvious act of progression, but that changes when players hit the cap. Progression then trends much more toward itemization -- you have to participate in the endgame experience to get more powerful gear. But as I said, there is underrated entry-level crafting gear which can be very useful for helping to ease PvP-oriented players into level-85 Battlegrounds.

OK, then why do we start earning Justice Points at 70? We can stockpile them till we have 4K; so if this really is your reasoning, why don't we get our JP/Honor wiped when we ding 85? I mean we didn't earn them doing endgame content, why should we be able to buy a few pieces of gear with them?

Just like removing VP from T11, this is another example of the complete lack of thought put into these details...

No, that's exactly the point of the design. If you enjoy doing some leveling via Battlegrounds, you're afforded the opportunity to buy up to two pieces of epic item level 371 PvP gear when you hit 85. You can then use gold and/or crafting materials to fill out just about every other slot, plus use enchantments, gems, and reforging to get your character into a competitive state for collecting additional epic Honor gear.

Heroic Ragnaros Rage

Just because your spec wasn't there, doesn't mean it couldn't be.

And not a single ele in top guild 1st kill....

working as intended blizzard?

It's so incredibly anecdotal there isn't even a proper frame of reference for having this debate.

Yes, it's working as intended that the first guild in the world to kill Heroic Ragnaros was allowed to bring whatever players/classes they were confident would help get the job done.

There's 25 slots in a raid.

There's 30 specs in the game.

Do the math, there's always going to be someone left out.

What are the odds that all 3 Shaman specs would be part of the 5 that didn't make it?

It doesn't matter at all unless you can verify and prove that Heroic Ragnaros is impossible, or way more difficult to kill, when a specific class or specialization is represented in the raid.

You're forcing together a couple of incredibly fragmented pieces of data -- and the sample size of that tested data is 25 players in the whole world fighting one boss in the entire game -- to extrapolate an entire thesis on class balance.

No one is going to benefit from trying to make an argument out of this.